


Pearl and Anchor

by croptopyeonbin



Category: TOMORROW X TOGETHER | TXT (Korea Band)
Genre: Interspecies Sex, Intrusive Thoughts, M/M, Unaddressed Trauma, death of a parent- mother, handjob, human yeonjun, mermaid au, mild and non-explicit death ideation, siren soobin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:08:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26506471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/croptopyeonbin/pseuds/croptopyeonbin
Summary: There was something there, just out of reach. Not the secret so deeply buried Yeonjun didn’t know he yearned to find it, but a flash of some new enigma.A man’s head and shoulders breached the surface of the waves, where no one should be. Their eyes met in one wild moment, and then the man leapt backwards in a wide arc. The torus of his pale naked body turned into an impossible tail and ended with the double-lobed fluke of a white beluga as he disappeared beneath the surf.Yeonjun yanked off his cable-knit and jumped in.
Relationships: Choi Soobin/Choi Yeonjun
Comments: 37
Kudos: 155





	Pearl and Anchor

**Author's Note:**

> Please do pay attention to the tags! This work has dark themes and will not be for everybody.

Yeonjun was born at sea. 

When he thinks of the ocean he imagines that first gulp of air, sweet with relief, after coming up from a long dive. The salt sting against his burnt arms and legs. Weightlessness. The wink of a wide, flat tail disappearing beneath the stern.

Milky blue hair, like the inside of a clam shell, winking at him beneath the waves. 

The sea was the womb of the world, and he returned to it to be reborn over and over again.

“Do you have–” Soobin tugs on Yeonjun’s sleeve. “This? On your body all the time?” 

Yeonjun looks down at his thin sweater and cream linen pants. “Yeah, I guess. Most of the time.” 

Soobin tilts his head to the side; his fluke flaps twice. Out of the water, reclining on Yeonjun’s deck, his mismatched body is an elegant riddle without answer. “You cover yourself around other humans?” 

“Yes, usually.” Yeonjun smiles. 

“When do you not?” 

“So many questions today! When I like them enough, I suppose.” He thinks about it. “When I’m okay being vulnerable.” 

“I’m vulnerable around you, aren’t I.”

It should’ve been a question, but it wasn’t. Yeonjun eyes the width of Soobin’s shoulders. His tail, long and smoothly muscular, is probably strong enough to capsize the boat and Yeonjun along with it. He could put his arms around Yeonjun, pull him down from the surface, hold him tightly as fewer and fewer air bubbles escaped from Yeonjun’s open mouth and they sink– 

Soobin’s finger dips into the rim of Yeonjun’s neckline, stretching out the cashmere just a little bit. “Don’t cover yourself around me.” 

The sweater comes off first; Yeonjun pulls it over his head hastily, and Soobin grins with full dimples to see how similar they look. Shoulders, chest, nipples, and waist. But below the hips was another thing. Yeonjun slides his pants off slowly, and Soobin’s eyes follow the material to glide down his long, long legs.

“Now we’re the same,” says Yeonjun, kicking off his blue Sperry’s. 

Soobin stares at his feet in quiet refutation. 

They lay side by side on the deck like that, bare to the sky sliding into dusk. Soobin’s hand inches over until he brushes a tentative finger pad against the skin of Yeonjun’s thigh. 

“Soft,” he murmurs. 

Yeonjun holds in a breath. His legs part. “Here, too,” he says.

Soobin pushes himself up on one arm to lean over. His face is open and curious. The hand that travels down the inside of his thigh is huge and gentle. Slow moving. Soobin’s fingers press into the muscle with interest. There’s a question in his touch, and Yeonjun answers it by leaning up to almost-kiss him. Soobin’s hair is almost completely dry; some strands, unencumbered by the weight of water, lift up with the wind. Yeonjun twists a few pearly blue locks around his fingers, tugging until Soobin huffs out a pained breath against his shoulder. His hand tightens around Yeonjun’s thigh. 

It’s easy to push him until Soobin is sitting the way he wants, leaning back against the stanchion. Yeonjun kneels over him with one leg on either side of where Soobin’s skin bleeds into a thick powerful tail, shining and white under the last rays of the day. 

When they do this under water with Yeonjun’s legs hitched around Soobin’s waist to keep himself from sinking to the bottom of the ocean, each kiss is a brief moment of drowning as water rushes into his open mouth along with Soobin’s tongue. But on the deck of the boat, Yeonjun can kiss him like drinking down a fresh oyster. Gravity helps him to grind the mismatched architecture of their bodies together, like puzzle pieces from two separate boxes that looked as though they _might_ fit but couldn’t. 

Still.

“Yeonjun,” Soobin says lowly. “Show me how you–“

“Here, like this. Mm.”

Yeonjun presses Soobin to the point between his legs, already firming. Soobin’s hand, bigger than his own, closes around him and Yeonjun thrusts forward into it with a close lipped groan. The pressure makes his back arch. Yeonjun’s hands grab at Soobin’s shoulders, uses them to balance himself as he rocks back and forth, fucking needily into Soobin’s tight grip.

“Yeah,” he whispers in a rush. "Soobin, touch me.”

Soobin’s free hand curls around the shape of Yeonjun’s hip. It drifts downward, inquiring but unhurried, long fingers splayed out to map all the parts of Yeonjun that he himself doesn’t have below the waist. Soobin gives the muscle of his ass a firm squeeze, and Yeonjun makes a high, short noise like an animal in pain.

“No, don’t stop,” he chokes out when Soobin tries to draw his hand away hurriedly. “Touch– there!”

Soobin moves his hand back, and back. He dips his fingers tentatively into that secret, unfamiliar crevice. When Soobin rubs searchingly across his hole, Yeonjun shakes apart into his palm with a sharp cry and sags forward.

“Yeonjun,” Soobin rasps. He mouths a trail of wet bites along his neck as Yeonjun gasps through the aftermath. Soobin’s hands rub up and down his back, wiping Yeonjun’s own come along his skin. He could forget about things like that, sometimes; _washing_ was not a concept for someone who had lived their whole life under water. “Yeonjun… Can you breathe?”

It takes him a little bit, but. “Yes,” he pants open-mouthed against Soobin’s shoulder. “Yeah.”

Soobin smells like cold melon and fresh kelp. Yeonjun inhales, lets it give him life.

Yeonjun took after his mother. He got her hooded eyes, and her little nasally giggle. Her love of clothes, and a penchant for collecting knick-knacks as well– bits and pieces of the detritus of life with nowhere else to live but within her pockets, the depths of her purse, the little cupholders in her car. 

The family curse too, his father liked to say with a grim expression. 

The news coverage had been inescapable in the aftermath. Most of what Yeonjun remembers from that time was everyone trying to hide something from him, but it was like trying to separate water with a net; the meaning of things washed over his young mind like a flood. 

_“_ **Blue-chip heiress, wife and mother, mysteriously disappears at sea on family yacht like her father two decades prior** _."_

There was something to be said about patterns; the human mind craved them. It frightened people, Yeonjun knew, when he insisted on picking up the family hobby of sailing. Two dots made a line pointing to some kind of conclusion, which was bad enough, but three dots… Three meant a stable thing, a shape that could stand up on its own, unignorable in its dimensionality. 

There was a tight kernel within him, beyond the place where rational thoughts lived, that believed his mother could still be found. That one day he might look over the bow and see her, treading water above the foam with a toothy smile, chic bob still perfectly fashionable even wet and plastered down around her face.

_Yeonjun-ah! Want to go get some banana milk with umma? Let’s go down to the store, hmm?_

It was not a thing he would ever have shared with anyone, especially not family or the child psychologist assigned to him by the looming headmaster at school. He nurtured it in secret between classes and private tennis lessons and ski trips to the Dolomites over the holidays. 

People were nice to a kid with a dead mother. As he grew older he learned that excellence was another way to keep adults off of him. Between extended condolences and top-of-the-class marks, it was hard to say no. And technically, all his grandfather’s boats were his by inheritance anyway. 

When the time came, Yeonjun deferred Princeton for a year. 

Well. Maybe some time learning the ropes at the firm would do him more good than school abroad, his father commented, looking dubious. He wasn’t much more than a husk all the years _after_ , with little interest governing either in the boardroom or at home. 

They set Yeonjun up with a corner office that came with a fancy Keurig machine and an overeager assistant. The expectations for him were subterranean, and his free time was his own. All he had to do now was learn what so fascinated his mother and his mother’s father– some deep and inevitable secret waiting for him to arrive at a tipping point. 

A year turned into two, which turned into three. Princeton quietly withdrew their acceptance.

Out at sea all that nothingness filled Yeonjun up in a way that he could not get elsewhere. 

Of course the thing about nothingness was that, by the laws of the universe, it was impossible. One could find answers to questions they weren’t asking. 

That day, it was the song he heard first before he saw anything. Yeonjun’s hands froze on the ropes as he was pulling on the jib sheet. His was the only craft around for miles and miles; there were no other sails on the horizon in any direction. There was a winter squall on its way, rolling in from the middle of the Pacific, and everyone else had headed back in towards the harbor. 

A sweet and easy melody he hadn’t heard in many years, lifted from the foggy memories of his childhood in a low but airy vibrato that carried across the water’s surface:

_On a vast, wide open seashore_

_There’s a little grass hut_

_There’s a mother who catches fish_

_And a son she doesn’t know_

Yeonjun nearly tripped over the chainplate as he rushed forward. Leaning over the front tip of his boat, eyes on the rolling surf ahead and his heart pounding, he listened.

_Oh my love, oh my love_

_You left him all alone_

_Oh, wherever did you go?_

There was something there, just out of reach. Not the secret so deeply buried Yeonjun didn’t know he yearned to find it, but a flash of some new enigma.

A man’s head and shoulders breached the surface of the waves, where no one should be. Their eyes met in one wild moment, and then the man leapt backwards in a wide arc. The torus of his pale naked body turned into an impossible tail and ended with the double-lobed fluke of a white beluga as he disappeared beneath the surf.

Yeonjun yanked off his cable-knit and jumped in. He hit the water shivering wildly, from the chill of the incoming storm or from shock.

Under water, the voice was even louder.

_There’s a mother who catches fish_

_And a son she doesn’t know_

_You left him all alone_

_Oh, wherever did you go?_

It was a song anyone could know, he told himself. It didn’t mean anything.

There was a milky shape growing bigger as it swam toward him, almost serpentine despite its bulk. The blurred edges of it became clearer until the phantom had a face, the same face Yeonjun saw cresting the surface. The watery sphinx with the impossible body reached a hand out to him. His expression was serene, but distant and unknowable.

Yeonjun touched their palms together, fingers curling.

“Are you lost?” it asked with the voice that sang.

And Yeonjun, mouth closed against the sea, could not answer.

There was the world that contained everything and everyone Yeonjun knew.

And then there was the ocean, and Soobin. Wilder and more alluring than all the rest together.

Yeonjun woke every morning and brushed his teeth and ate breakfast and went to work thinking of the next time he would sail out. He visited his father and his father’s parents and attended dinners with his classmates, the ones who were getting engaged and promoted and always mentioning so-and-so to set him up with. He passed out bottles of Cass Lite, responded politely, cut the kimchi with scissors and a smile.

His world had been irrevocably reversed. What once was real was now reduced to an intermediary phase until the next time he saw Soobin, like a repeated purgatory that could not be avoided, only tolerated. It was a dream in which he floated through like a ghost.

He had taken to carrying tokens around with him during the day. Ridged seashells and little polished stones from the ocean floor and shards of blue-green sea glass, the edges sharp to his skin. They were gifts from Soobin, brought up from beneath. They sat in his pocket and in the bottom of his messenger bag at work and on the nightstand for him to stare at as he fell asleep. They were wards against the mundanity of his life away from the thing that mattered most to him now.

They were a promise of something more, and Yeonjun counted them carefully at the beginning and end of each day. He could not afford to lose any reminder of Soobin’s existence. 

“Are you real?” he asks.

“Real enough,” Soobin says. He was swimming in lazy laps around the boat, flicking salty droplets onto Yeonjun where he sat dangling his legs in the water. “Don’t you see me, touch me?” 

Don’t you trust yourself to know?

A thought he’d been thinking for too long bubbled to the surface. Yeonjun fumbles for his phone in his pocket, and scrolls through the photos in his most private folder. He would sell his own nudes before he’d let others see these. Soobin was not any other, though. 

“Have you seen this person before?” He holds up the screen as Soobin swims close. 

The muscles of Soobin’s arms go taut as he lifts himself up against the hanging edge of the deck, squinting. His eyes weren’t used to seeing things digitally; sometimes images that were crystal clear to Yeonjun were barely comprehensible to him. There were no pixels in the ocean.

The photo was a little grainy but not too bad. Yeonjun’s mother was leaning against one of the columns of Sather Gate at Berkeley, with 90’s berry-brown lipstick and a graduation cap in hand. The wind was blowing her permed hair strongly in one direction, and her mouth was caught in an odd shape mid-smile, but she still looked good. Beautiful, even. 

Soobin blinks. He shakes his head.

“Okay. Okay, how about now?” 

Jumping ahead a decade, in this photo Yeonjun’s mother had grown sleek and feminine in adulthood. She now looked close to how she did the day she cast off and never came back. Beneath a wide brimmed hat, her hooded eyes (his eyes too) creased above a carefree grin. People were always laughing around her, Yeonjun remembers. Tucked under one arm was a young boy wearing denim overalls and a hat shaped like a cartoon shark. 

Soobin stares. “No,” he says kindly after a long moment. 

“Alright.” 

Yeonjun closes his eyes. It was not good to have expectations about the impossible. He breathes, feeling the salt air fill his lungs. Notes how it feels when his chest expands outwards. Reminds himself he’s still here.

Fingers touch his knee tentatively. Soobin’s hand, icy and wet, trails down his calf until it cups his heel. Yeonjun opens his eyes, watches as Soobin lifts his foot out of the water to place a tender, open-mouthed kiss over the bone of his ankle.

“Come down with me,” Soobin asks in a soft hum.

Yeonjun sets his phone aside, takes a deep breath, and slides off the boat. 

In high school the head swim coach had begged him to join the team. Yeonjun’s front crawl lap during second year Sports Day easily outpaced half the swim team’s competitive times. Eventually someone must’ve filled him in on Yeonjun’s family history and he apologized months later with an awkward, public bow in the hall. It was embarrassing, though all for the best. Yeonjun wouldn’t have done it for anybody anyway.

He is, freakishly, even better at diving. One Amalfi Coast summer he’d gone cliff jumping off Capri and had simply kept swimming toward the corals below when he realized he could. 

It’s harder out in the open ocean, where the greater salinity makes buoyancy stronger. Yeonjun savors the resistance against each of his movements. He works hard for each centimeter of progress, arms pushing forward and out as he tunnels downward. To challenge one’s own survival, heading farther away from his next breath with each stroke, requires a kind of forceful delusion.

He has just over three minutes in him, and within that time Yeonjun knows he can dive to about sixty meters. That top slice of water, warmed from the sun above, feels almost placental. All life came from the sea, after all. Long ago some creature had flopped up on land, and their offspring’s offspring’s offspring grew legs, and they never came back. But Yeonjun comes back, pulled again and again to that great primordial womb by some tidal force.

Soobin swirls just ahead of him, the pale moon glow of his tail undulating hypnotically beneath the light beaming from above. Yeonjun might be gifted by human standards, but Soobin was a creature of deep water. He could dive effortlessly beyond any depth Yeonjun might attempt without an oxygen tank, propel himself faster than Yeonjun could dream of going. His body, sleek and powerful, was made with purpose.

Yeonjun follows behind him.

Soobin is singing as they plunge downward, that same song with the familiar, haunting melody. 

_You left him all alone_

_Oh, wherever did you go?_

It’s strange, Yeonjun realizes. He never remembers to ask about the song until the next time Soobin sings it. And Soobin only sings when they swim together, when Yeonjun has to keep his mouth closed to prevent a watery end out here where no one would ever know what happened to him except for Soobin.

He knows what people would say if he never came back: Oh, how dreadful. But… it was to be expected, no? That was the point of pedigree. If you want to know about the foal, look up the dam and damsire in the studbook. 

When we surface, is what Yeonjun tells himself. This time, he’ll surely remember. He’ll ask Soobin, how do you know this song? And how does it end? _What happens to the mother and her son?_

He pushes on, eyes hooked to the white moonglow of Soobin’s tail below. The water gets darker as they

descend.

It gets colder away from the surface too, and his fingers and toes start tingling with not-quite-there sensation. Yeonjun mentally counts back in time. Three minutes is all he has, and his lungs have begun burning in that particular way that tells him he’s close to his limits. He might be tearing up, it’s impossible to tell. 

Soobin stops to a float, turning slowly to face him. Yeonjun curls his limbs to his chest, aching, suspended in weightlessness. Soobin reaches for him with both hands, cups his trembling jaw.

“Yeonjun. You’re the pearl in my hand,” Soobin sing-songs in that voice. He leans forward, brushes their lips together with a glacial tenderness. “Do you love me?”

Yeonjun opens his mouth, lets the sea in.

**Author's Note:**

> vinnie: haha mermaid soobin :) 
> 
> me: googles different whales for days, downloads sailboat schematics, looks up freediving jargon, agonizes over anatomical issues for over a week, pumps out lots of sad words and yells about mythology and philosophy to 27 people ahhh 
> 
> this ended up being darker than i originally intended, but i loved writing it and would be interested to see what people make of the ambiguity! do you think soobin is telling the truth? 🤔🧐 i don't have an actual answer tbh but there will potentially be more to this... maybe. so make of that what you will! 
> 
> soobin's song is a real korean folk tune, but i adapted the lyrics slightly to fit this premise. 
> 
> you can find me here on [twt](https://twitter.com/croptopyeonbin) where i yell a lot about yeonbin and stress over whatever i'm writing


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